Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

“I must have picked up the wrong keys,” says Saudade to the questioning faces of the neighbors who've opened doors on his landing. “My wife wakes up late. Ha ha.”

In the elevator down to the street, Saudade examines a sock on the elevator floor with a pensive expression. The sock is vaguely familiar to him. Or at least enough for him to know that at some point it was white. The chain of implications of the episode he seems to be experiencing is too terrible to even consider. He exits the apartment building and looks up toward the balcony of his house. The plastic Christmas tree remains in the same place on the balcony where he left it two years ago. Then he turns to look at the boxes sprinkled with urine beside the Dumpsters. A powder blue and white sleeve with Umbro's rhomboid logotype sticks out of one of the boxes. Certain suspicions arise in Saudade's mind. Dogs barking and the screech of commercial gates opening are heard in the distance. Saudade kneels and picks up a piece of broken paving tile from the paved ground. He takes a few steps back and throws it toward his own balcony. The piece of tile breaks the glass of his balcony's glass doors with a sound that creates echoes in the early-morning air.

“Where's the other sock?” shouts Saudade to his wife's face when she appears on the balcony. Holding up the once white sock that he picked up in the elevator. “What did you do with my things?”

“Your son is calling the police,” answers Matilde Saudade from the balcony. With her face transformed into a whirlwind of surprised eyebrow gestures. “Now I'm going to lower the blinds.”

Saudade examines the sock in his hand with a pensive face. He uses it to wipe the sweat from his forehead and looks up again at the balcony. The sound of commercial gates screeching open seems excessive compared to the number of businesses in the neighborhood.

“I spent the night working in the warehouse,” says Saudade with his hands placed at either side of his mouth, the way people do when they are trying to project their voice. Forgetting perhaps that he has a dirty sock in his hand. “If you don't believe me, call whoever you want. Remember your overactive imagination problems.”

“I sold my wedding ring,” says Matilde Saudade's face, suspended above the railing of the balcony. With her hair hanging from both sides of her face. The perspective that Saudade has of his wife's face from the street is both familiar and strangely unfamiliar. “To pay for the new lock. Go sleep somewhere else, please.”

Saudade puts the sock in the pocket of his sweat suit and sits on a step at the building's entrance. His feeling of well-being seems to have almost completely vanished. If there's one thing that Saudade hates intensely in this world, it's problems. Up until that moment he was fairly convinced that he had managed to establish a pretty satisfactory strategy in his life for making problems abruptly swerve as they approached him and go piss off somebody else. Saudade doesn't have anything against other people's problems. Now he sighs. He hugs his knees and drums his fingers against one of his legs. In the distance, beyond and below the elevated concrete platform that dominates most of the neighborhood filled with apartment buildings, a new noise is heard. It isn't the screech of commercial gates or the barking of wild dogs. The sky has turned from pink to soft purple and then to an intense blue that you only see in deep winter skies. The noise heard in the distance is the sound of sirens from police patrol cars. Saudade is definitely beginning to suspect that a problem has just shown up in his life.

“I want you to go, too,” says the voice of Cristian Saudade from some point located above his father's head. “You never talk to me. And I hate your soccer team.”

Saudade approaches the boxes sprinkled with urine next to the Dumpsters and opens the first one. He takes out several pieces of clothing. Many of them look as if they haven't been washed in a long time. A pair of dark glasses from his days as a cop. Souvenir T-shirts from day trips to coastal towns overwhelmingly devoted to the leisure industry. Fruit-flavored condoms. He opens another box. Clothes. DVD movies. The seminal works of his pornography collection in DVD. One Up Front and One Up Back 3. Barely Legal: Volumes 1 and 2. Anal Rapist 6. Anal Virgins 2. Two regional police officers appear at the top of the stairs of the elevated platform. Saudade sticks several DVDs in the pockets of his sweat suit. Inside the pant legs. Inside the jacket of his sweat suit. The DVD movies he sticks inside the jacket of his sweat suit accumulate around his waist and give him a strangely marsupial look.

“Sir,” says the voice of a police officer behind him. With that friendly and at the same time peremptory tone that police officers use in situations of potential conflict. “Sir, stand up and put your hands where we can see them, please.”

Saudade opens another box. More DVD movies. Colored condoms. Condoms with latex rings. Saudade's thoughts include several rhetorical questions regarding what went wrong in his life to cause such an unfair turn of events. He takes a traditional Japanese nunchaku out of the box and holds it up with a vaguely melancholy expression.

“Sir,” says the policeman's voice from behind his back, “it would be best if you left that on the ground, sir. Without any strange movements.”

Saudade puts the nunchaku on the ground and stands up and turns slowly with his arms in the air. Out of the corner of his eye he can see his family and his neighbors looking out from their respective balconies. Obeying a gesture from the policeman in front of him who is aiming at him with his standard-issue firearm, he unzips the upper part of the sweat suit of his favorite sports team. A dozen DVD movies fall at his feet.

The gym of the Giraut family house in the Ampurdan region is a structure of glass and steel beams attached to the main building of the art nouveau — style house with forged-steel balconies. Half a dozen pieces of gym equipment line the large front window with views of the breakwater. There are men squatting and men crouching. All dressed in business suits. There is a man in a suit, standing up on a stool, feeling the inside of a ceiling lamp with a hand sheathed in a latex glove. Another man is taking towels out of the closets. All the men in the room wear latex gloves. Except Fonseca. Fonseca isn't wearing gloves. Fonseca is standing in front of the large window watching Fanny Giraut's figure approach along the path from the breakwater. With the enormous system of treelike veins throbbing in his temples. Smoking a cigarette. There is a man in a suit squatting to examine the lower part of an exercise machine that's similar to one of those motorcycles without wheels in movies set in the future. With his butt pointed toward the Ampurdan sky.

The paved path meticulously lined with pebbles that leads from the breakwater to the Giraut family house is known as the Beach Trail.

Fonseca frowns. Fanny Giraut's figure has stopped in the middle of the path from the beach and is now watching the scene in the gym through the large window. With the inexpressive mask that is her surgically modified face. She is wearing a turban and the upper part of a two-piece bathing suit and a paisley sarong that reveals her legs below the knee. The number of operations to remove varicose veins that Fanny Giraut has undergone to date is eight.

“Sir,” says one of the men in business suits and latex gloves behind Fonseca's back, “we might have to move some of these machines, sir. To see what's underneath them.”

To anyone who knows Fonseca either in his private life or in his public legal practice it is obvious that the system of treelike throbbing veins in his temples reveals a much higher degree of nervousness than the normal amount derived from situations of professional stress. The man who has just addressed him has both gloved hands held high the way surgeons hold their hands when they are about to perform an operation.